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HALF-FULL REPORT 06/19/09


Tomorrow's the day, folks.  Crunch time in Tehran.  You know what happened today:  head mullah Ali Khamenei delivered the Friday sermon everyone was waiting for, and he didn't give a fig for freedom.

He insisted the June 12 elections were fair and not fraudulent, ordered the protestors to stop demonstrating in any way, and obey their master Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Any opposition rallies are banned, he said, and any attempt to hold one will be put down with armed force.  His speech was as hard-line as it could possibly have been.

It is 10pm Friday evening in Tehran as I am writing this, and protestors have begun shouting Allahu akbar - their cry of protest - from the rooftops.  Their cell calls, emails, and twitters give every indication that they plan to hold enormous rallies tomorrow in straight defiance of Khamenei and the mullah regime.

There will be blood tomorrow.  But whose?

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LESSONS FROM GEORGIA


Tbilisi, Georgia. Despite having been invaded two months ago by a country 30 times its size, the Republic of Georgia appears to be dealing with that crisis far better than the United States and other major governments are dealing with the international financial crisis, and thus the question is, "Why"?

The answer quite simply is that the Georgia leaders are not so arrogant to think they know better than markets, and hence they are relying on the market to solve most of their problems.

The prime minister, Lado Gurgenidze, was both educated and spent considerable time in England and clearly was influenced by Margaret Thatcher. I asked him if he was concerned that the pressures to grow the size of government because of the invasion would undermine Georgia's reforms (note: history shows governments almost always grow in relative size versus the private economy in the time of crisis, such as wars or financial instability, even if governments create the crisis).

The prime minister replied that the Georgians have not retreated from their reforms, including shrinking the size of government, and they fully understand any retrenchment would be very damaging.

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MOSLEM TERRORIST DRUG LORDS WITH NUKES


How's that for your basic nightmare scenario?  Welcome to Pakistan's future.  And for once, the Moonbats are right.  It is Bush's fault.

It is not, of course, Bush's fault that Pakistan is a make-believe country ludicrously constructed by the colonial British, as we learned in The Lunacy of a British Legacy

It's not his fault that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI - the Pak CIA) created the Taliban as a joint business venture to run the Afghan heroin trade (as we learned about in The Bourne Absurdity).

But it is his fault for not eliminating Afghanistan's  poppy fields, which are capitalizing the Islamist maelstrom engulfing Pakistan. 

That's because the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, along with the family's business partners in New Jersey, are making millions from Afghan heroin as well.

All the media attention is now on Pervez Musharraf and his consolidation of power, with predictable puerile moaning about his "threat to democracy."  Naturally, almost no big media attention is paid to the heroin drug money fueling the crisis. 

If they did, reporters' attention might better be directed away from the riotous streets of Islamabad and towards a McMansion on a leafy quiet street in Mendham, New Jersey.

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THE BIGOTRY OF THE LEFT


American and European leftists share the conviction that the immigrant, legal or illegal, is always right -- and the native-born citizen is always wrong.

This bigotry toward the law-abiding American, Brit, Frenchman or Italian doesn't help the immigrant in the end. Instead, it's a powerful engine driving divisiveness.

There are deep differences between Europe's experience with legal immigrants intent on importing intolerant lifestyles and our problem with illegals responsible for social friction and violent criminality.

But the left's blame-game is identical: Anyone who doesn't elevate the "rights" of the immigrant over the rights, safety and desires of the citizen is a bigot. No exceptions. Could there be a formula better designed to excite anti-immigrant sentiment?  As the left's blame-the-citizen demands for special privileges for all immigrants only intensify an anti-immigrant backlash, let's apply some commonsense maxims:

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HALF-FULL REPORT 06/12/09


David Letterman certainly settled one thing this week:  that the terms  "no-class pervert scumbag" and "liberal" are synonymous.  

Sarah Palin wrote a classy yet scathing response to his depraved jokes about her 14 year-old daughter, but she shouldn't have restrained her husband Todd from responding how he wanted.  Like any father, he wanted to punch Letterman out.

Todd wanted to issue a public statement saying something like: 

"Mr. Letterman, you have insulted my daughter in the most grossly perverted way.  I am on my way to New York as you read this to see you.  We shall settle this man-to-man, with our fists.  Prepare to defend yourself.  If you choose not to fight, you will have declared to the world that you are the yellow-bellied coward I know you to be."
Letterman would have soiled his metrosexual pink underwear.

***
Yet liberals are not the only folks scared to death of Sarah Palin.  So are the old bulls of the Republican Party Establishment - which is why they replaced her with Newt Gingrich at their annual Senate-House fundraising dinner Monday night (6/08).

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LESSONS FROM BULGARIA


Can you name a country that has a flat 10 percent income tax on both personal and corporate income, and that is also running a budget surplus of 8 percent of gross domestic product (the equivalent of the United States running a budget surplus of more than $1 trillion)?

The surprising answer is Bulgaria, formerly one of Europe's most backward countries.

Most of the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe have instituted flat-rate income tax systems. Estonia was the first, and Bulgaria is one of the most recent, having only moved to the 10 percent flat rate at the beginning of this year.

It's one of several lessons America and the politicians she elects could learn from Bulgaria.

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DEMOCRACY, DEMOCRATS, AND TAXES


In response to The Salvation of 2008, TTPer "Bogie" was thoughtful enough to post on the User Forum a list of 50 reasons for The Fair Tax.

Together, they make a pretty convincing case for replacing all personal/corporate income taxes, FICA payroll taxes, gift/death taxes and the AMT with a national retail sales tax.  I would add #51, the end of the depreciation schedule for a business' capital expenditures.

Yet there is another overarching reason for the Fair Tax replacing our present tax structure, which is that it is vastly more democratic, and provides a far firmer and more stable foundation for a democracy.

Which is why Democrats are against it because they don't want a real democracy.

Take a look at the Who Pays Income Taxes charts from the National Taxpayers Union.  You'll see that over the last several years, the percentage of total income taxes paid by the top 1%, top 5%, top 10% of taxpayers has gone up, while that paid by the bottom 50% has gone down.  1% of taxpayers now pay almost 40% of all personal income taxes, while 50% pays 3%.

How dangerous this is for a democracy can be seen with this simple image:  imagine balancing a pyramid on its point.

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OUR #1 NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT IS MEXICO


South of the border, down Mexico way, a new and savage revolution rages just beyond our inspection lanes. After less than five years of fighting, estimates of the dead have reached 22,000.

The rate of killing accelerates each month. And Washington covers its eyes like a kid at a scary movie. Well, the Mexican narco-insurgency, in which well-armed guerrilla forces confront the authority and presence of the state, is our No. 1 security challenge.

The chaos in northern Mexico has far deeper implications for our country than Islamist terror or even an Iranian nuclear capability (as grim as those threats are).

The rule of law has collapsed from Tijuana (across from San Diego, California) on the Pacific's edge to Matamoros (across from Brownsville, Texas) on the Gulf of Mexico. Major cities are now "ungoverned spaces," as our diplomats refer tidily to distant trouble spots.

And Arizona's "discriminatory" new state law empowering police to pursue criminal aliens? Should Phoenix let the rule of law collapse because Washington prefers political correctness to public safety? In DC, it's about politics. In Arizona, it's about survival.

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DON’T THE POLITICIANS WHO CAUSED THIS CRISIS BELONG IN JAIL?


If government agencies pressure banks to give loans to people who are poor credit risks, do you view this as a failure of capitalism or a failure of government? A number of left-wing politicians and commentators have made the assertion that the financial crisis is a result of too much deregulation under the "capitalistic" policies of President Reagan.

Those who make the assertion are either ignorant of the facts or being untruthful.

What we have seen is not a failure of free-market democratic capitalism, but another failure of a government that destroyed the normal market mechanisms for dealing with risk.

There have been many calls for the "greedy" to be punished, but the political "greed" for power and money is even more dangerous than excesses practiced by occasional business people.

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TECHNOLOGY, FREEDOM, AND SAVING LIVES


When a super-genius tells you that you may have saved millions of lives, it really makes your day. 

You read about Durk Pearson last August, that he has an IQ M.I.T. was unable to measure as it was so far above the upper measurable limit of 220.  And you read about my having dinner with Chief Justice John Roberts last week in The Only Issue.

I was telling Durk about the dinner and how it wasn't appropriate for me to ask him substantive case questions, but that I was able to contribute to the conversation.  The connection between technology and freedom was raised and I offered to give an example.

The technology of gene sequencing, I said, can now, at the cost of many millions of dollars, sequence the entire genome of an individual person, identifying all the recognizable mutations and genetic defects that person has.

Gene sequencing technology is improving at such a rapid rate that a Moore's Law is now kicking in regarding it.

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DON’T WORRY AMERICA – ISRAEL IS BEHIND YOU


Israel's status as the US's most vital ally in the Middle East has been so widely recognized for so long that over the years, Israeli and American leaders alike have felt it unnecessary to explain what it is about the alliance that makes it so important for the US.

This week - April 19 - we celebrate Israel's 62nd Independence Day.  As the Obama administration is openly distancing the US from Israel while giving the impression that Israel is a strategic impediment to the administration's attempts to strengthen its relations with the Arab world, recalling why Israel is the US's most important ally in the Middle East has become a matter of some urgency.

Much is made of the fact that Israel is a democracy. But we seldom consider why the fact that Israel is a representative democracy matters. The fact that Israel is a democracy means that its alliance with America reflects the will of the Israeli people. As such, it remains constant regardless of who is power in Jerusalem.

All of the US's other alliances in the Middle East are with authoritarian regimes whose people do not share the pro-American views of their leaders. The death of leaders or other political developments are liable to bring about rapid and dramatic changes in their relations with the US.

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HALF-FULL REPORT 05/29/09


The question of the week:  who is stupider, the Norks or all those intimidated by them?

Lot's of fun stuff happened this week.  Tombstone Burris dug his political grave deeper with a tape of his offering a bribe to Hot Rod Blogojevich. 

Zero's Chicago gangsterism towards Republican Chrysler dealers - spotted by sharp-eyed TTPers on the Forum (see the thread for A Letter to America from a Dodge Dealer) - is being exposed for all to see.   Drudge is carrying both Rick Moran's article and that of the Washington Examiner.  My old friend Joe Farah is running solid exposés on WorldNetDaily.  Zero is running a straightforward Political Mafia.

And Zero further solidified his racism by nominating a racist shrew for the Supreme Court who is so IQ-challenged she'll be steamrollered by Roberts, Alito, and Scalia in conference - as pointed out by Jack Kelly.

But we'll focus on the Norks, who can't seem to make a real bomb yet somehow sucker the world into thinking they have.

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THE CONSPIRACY OF THE CRISIS WITH ISRAEL


Last month, President Barack Obama opened a diplomatic war on Israel. The proximate cause of his offensive was the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Board's decision to approve the future construction of 1,600 housing units in northern Jerusalem.

The goal of the assault is twofold. First, it seeks to undermine the legitimacy of Israel's control over Jerusalem in order to weaken Israel's standing among the American public. As Obama advisor Martin Indyk mocked, Obama's onslaught against Israel has made the Netanyahu government "supersensitive," about Jerusalem.

Second, through his unprecedented attacks on Israel's right to sovereignty over its capital city, Obama is working to topple Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government in the hopes of replacing it with a leftist government led by Tzipi Livni and Kadima. In other words, the "crisis" between the US and Israel -- so named by Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama -- was a set up, created by a conspiracy between the Kadima and Democrat Parties.

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SURPRISED BY THE OBVIOUS


Are all too many in the global political class doltish, or do they just appear that way? The current financial meltdown has revealed an amazing number of revelations from people who were surprised by the obvious.

For years, liberal Democrats in Congress and some Republicans pushed for banks and other institutions to make home loans to unqualified borrowers, and suddenly we find many of these people cannot repay their loans.

The reaction from members of Congress, like the "surprised" Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is to demand investigation of "greedy bankers," while ignoring the fact that it was her left-wing colleagues who created the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that required the banks to lend to people who were poor credit risks in the name of "housing rights."

A Chicago "public interest" lawyer named Barack Hussein Obama was active in this movement.

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HALF-FULL REPORT 05/08/09


First up this week is something I should entitle Blown Away By Who You Are.  We have been deluged by TTPers who wish to participate in the Achilles Heel Project (AHP) and are simply in awe of their bios.

The talent pool of TTP - the variety and depth of accomplishments, experience, knowledge, and credentials in so many fields - is astounding.   We're marshalling it for AHP, but I want to synergize it for TTP as a whole.  So we have formed a "social networking" site for this purpose:  http://tothepointnews.ning.com/.

Here is where TTPers can go to meet, chat, and collaborate with each other.  There are so many wonderful folks on TTP - here's how you can all get to know yourselves.  Have fun and synergize!

***
Next is an announcement:  the TTP Summer Rendezvous -  the Winning the Revolution Rendezvous - will be in Williamsburg, Virginia from Friday, September 11 to Monday, September 14.

Colonial Williamsburg  recreates the America of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.  Nearby Jamestown is where the settlement of America began in 1607.  And close by is Yorktown, where America achieved victory in its War of Independence in 1781.

What more appropriate place could there be - and what more appropriate date than September 11 weekend - for TTPers to join together and commit to winning our American liberty once again?

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