Last week (7/05), in a case before the U.S. Military Court of Appeals, by a 3-2 vote the judges delivered an outrageous decision.

Army Ranger First Lieutenant Michael Behenna was deemed to have no right to self-defense when he killed the Iraqi prisoner he was interrogating after the latter threw a concrete block at him and tried to seize his firearm.

Unless he is pardoned, Lt. Behenna will remain incarcerated for the next twelve years.  (Note: to support Lt. Behenna, go to defendmichael.com.)

Unfortunately, under President Obama, service personnel's rising fears of being prosecuted for acting to protect themselves and their missions are but one of many disastrous ways in which the military is being, to use his now-infamous turn of phrase, "fundamentally transformed." Consider a quartet of examples:

When I hear politicians say they cannot cut government spending and we must have tax increases, I know they are either corrupt or incompetent.

Anyone who has ever been around government agencies knows that they tend to be overstaffed and inefficient compared with operations in the private sector. But we also know that many governments in other countries do a much better job in managing taxpayer dollars than ours.

At a minimum, we should demand that our political leaders manage the government they are responsible for as well as other political leaders in these countries manage their governments.

President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats say we cannot reduce our debt problem to manageable levels without increasing taxes. I say, why not? Some other countries spend less per capita and yet provide higher levels of government service. Take a look at the chart below.

One of the delights of science is its capacity for showing us that the world is not as it seems. A good example is the startling statistic that there are at least 10 times as many bacterial cells (belonging to up to 1,000 species) in your gut as there are human cells in your entire body: that "you" are actually an entire microbial zoo as well as a person.

You are 90% microbes by cell count, though not by volume -- a handy reminder of just how small bacteria are.

It has been clear for a long time that the microbes in your gut are not just passengers but colleagues that help with the digestion of food: releasing vitamins, breaking down toxins and metabolizing nutrients into more useful forms.

What's becoming clear from such experiments is that they are also vital to the immune system's capacity to fight infection. It's as if they train the body's defense forces.

For instance, breast-fed babies, whose gut microbes are dominated by creatures called bifidobacteria, are less likely than formula-fed babies to suffer not only from diarrhea but also from allergies later in life.

Beware Greeks bearing debt -- or any other country that has too much of it.

Despite ever-increasing government regulation of banks, which often are required to hold government debt as reserves, the systemic risk of a failure in the global financial system is growing rather than diminishing. There are solutions that require less, rather than more, regulation.

If you look at the big banks that have been in trouble or the banks that regulators and others worry about being in financial trouble, you will notice that virtually all of them have a corporate form of ownership and are heavily regulated. They also increasingly are being forced to be tax collectors for governments.

There is an alternative form of bank ownership that is likely to lead to fewer problems and avoid the "too big to fail" problem, and that is mutual-fund banking.

One of the very first “Liberation Links” we put up at the inception of To The Point was to John Linder’s FairTax. John is a Republican Congressman from Georgia who has authored a bill, HR 25 for the 109th Congress, that would in his words, “repeal all corporate and individual income taxes, payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes and gift taxes - and replace it with a revenue-neutral personal consumption tax.”

If the FairTax were to become law, the IRS would cease to exist, and we would pay our taxes like we buy a gallon of gasoline. Yes, that gallon and just about everything else would cost 23% more in a national retail sales tax - but since business-to-business transactions are not taxed, nor would businesses be paying corporate taxes or the employers’ share of payroll taxes, consumer prices would drop by at least that 23% if not much more.

The extent of the explosion of increased prosperity that would happen throughout America if the FairTax were to replace the IRS is difficult to exaggerate. Let’s put it this way: The FairTax would be the single greatest act of wealth creation in the history of man.

We are now fast approaching a tipping point of acknowledgement that the federal tax code is irretrievably broken and has to be replaced. Linder’s FairTax is by far the best fix. Except there’s this one little problem - actually, it’s the 16th problem.

[Last Saturday (6/30), Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders delivered this speech at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado.]

Thank you, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, for inviting me to the Western Conservative Summit. It is always a pleasure to come to America. I was here a few weeks ago to meet with my dear friend, congresswoman Michele Bachmann, to talk about Islam and the threat to America and Europe.

I feel honored to have been invited to address you today about the situation in Europe and in particular in my own country, the Netherlands. This situation serves as a warning to what might happen in America if you fail to be vigilant.

For make no mistake: Islam is also coming for America. Indeed, it has already arrived. Your country, too, is facing a stealth jihad - an Islamic attempt to introduce Sharia law bit by bit.

Islam demands separate campus housing for Moslems; Islam demands that women have separate hours in gyms and swimming pools; schools are banning Christmas celebrations and are taking pork off their cafeteria menus to avoid offending Moslem students. And courts - even in America, we have seen an example in Florida - have begun to apply Sharia law.

Be aware that this is only the beginning.

Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal this past  week (6/21) attacking Republicans who have said that more government spending will kill jobs.

In the same vein, my old friend Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the George H.W. Bush administration, wrote an article attacking former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and other Republicans for claiming the Reagan tax cuts paid for themselves.

(Note: Mr. Bartlett used to be a supply-side advocate, but in the past few years, he has become an almost full-time Republican basher and, not surprisingly, now writes for the New York Times.)

Mr. Blinder, Mr. Bartlett and others of their stripe no longer seem to be able to see beyond the first-order effects of an economic policy. That is why they are always dead wrong.