A nosy, hectoring, busy-body, anti-smoking, anti-trans fat, social engineering, lifestyle blue-nosing, freedom-crushing, nanny-state enthusiast announced this week he's ready to spend a billion dollars of his vast wealth to run for president of our country.

Currently Michael Bloomberg is Mayor of New York.

The leading Democrat contender is Hillary Milhous Clinton, an anti-military radical feminist Euro-Socialist-cum-Trotskyite who is masquerading as a pro-military, pro-free-market, religious centrist.

But should Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. surprisingly get the Democratic nomination, then we would substitute for the secret leftist/publicly centrist Hillary Milhous a completely inexperienced African-American possibly former Moslem, partially Indonesian-raised, Harvard-trained ersatz Kennedyesque candidate.

This is turning into a freak show.  And I haven't even started with the Republicans.

It was a fitting image of the 14 wimps and a sob sister arriving back in the United Kingdom yesterday: skulking away with pink goody bags in hand.

The color was no accident - although yellow would've been more appropriate.

The released hostages weren't allowed to make any more statements. Apparently, the Blair government feared they'd repeat their lavish praise of their Iranian captors.

Look, we're all glad they're home safe, if not necessarily sound. But why on earth is Britain, the land of the legendary stiff upper lip, celebrating cowards who clambered over one another to shame their country?

Last week my former boss, Newt Gingrich, threw a much-needed conceptual bomb into the jejune public dialogue of presidential aspirants. Amid the platitudes, banalities and evasions that constitute pre-presidential debate these days, Newt argued (in a speech last weekend) that bilingual education only encourages students to be linguistically "living in a ghetto."

Predictably, the PC riot squad screeched into the media to suppress such clarity of language. Peter Zamora, co-chairman of the Hispanic Education Coalition, intoned: "The tone of his comments were [sic] very hateful."

Someone needs to tell Mr. Zamora that it is hateful of ideological "civil-rights" activists to try to intimidate any politician who would dare to liberate kids from the linguistic ghetto that serves to preserve their political power.

[After reading Professor Stott, I could not encourage you more to view  The Great Global Warming Swindle, a brilliant UK documentary not shown on US television but available on the Internet.  It's long but absolutely worth watching. ---JW]

Global warming represents the latest doom-laden "crisis," one demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil-fuel-driven ways.  But neither history nor science bolsters such an apocalyptic faith.

Our so-called "crisis" is neither a product of current observations nor of projections.

But does it matter if global warming is a "crisis" or not? Aren't we threatened by a serious temperature rise? Shouldn't we act anyway, because we are stewards of the environment?

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet."

What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence?

As an early and continuing strong supporter of President Bush's war effort, I nonetheless regularly have criticized his administration's inept communications and war-fighting strategies -- particularly in the years from 2004 to 2006.

Along with many others, I was both exasperated and puzzled by the gap between the magnitude of the president's bold enterprise and the stingy assignment of material resources (men and material), and diplomatic energy with which he provisioned it.

Even so, for all their mismanagement of a still vital and noble struggle, the Bush team has better served our cause than has the Democrat Party served its interests in its near-unanimous opposition to the war recently.

Theirs has been the most blatantly unprincipled war opposition short of treason in living memory -- and the Democrat Party is likely to pay a fearsome price at the polls for a generation.

In response to the media frenzy, initiated by the Washington Post, regarding the treatment of our soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I wish to give my perspective.

Please understand that I am speaking for myself and I am responsible for my thoughts alone.  The news media and politicians are making it sound like Walter Reed is a terrible place and the staff here has been abusing our brave wounded soldiers.  They are lying.

I am completing my 24th year of service in the Army next month.  I am currently the senior clinical chaplain at Walter Reed and have been so for the last four years. I will leave to go back to the infantry this summer. 

Here is the truth of what has happened.

As our president arrived in Brazil last week, our media made it sound as if Latin America had erupted in flames. TV news featured flying tear-gas canisters; a typical newspaper headline read, "Angry Crowds Rally Against President in Brazil."

Message: Bush is hated. He's ruined our relations with the hemisphere. Nobody loves us anymore - and it's all his fault.

If you bothered to read the reports below the headlines, you learned that 6,000 Brazilians had gathered in Sao Paulo to protest Bush's arrival in their country.

Wait a minute - wasn't that 600,000? Or at least 60,000?

Nope. Just 6,000 outraged citizens.   In one of the world's largest cities, with a population close to 20 million.

But no way were you going to see a headline that admits, "Anti-Bush Demonstrations Fizzle, Numbers Just Aren't There."

In the last week, two news items caught my attention.

News item No. 1: Dateline Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates - The Louvre Museum is selling the use of its name for a museum in Abu Dhabi for $520 million, and will rent out some of its art exhibits and provide technical museum management services for another $747 million.

News item No. 2: Dateline Dubai, United Arab Emirates - The Halliburton Corp. is moving its worldwide corporate headquarters to Dubai. It will keep most of its staff in Houston, will maintain its legal incorporation in the United States, will remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but will list its shares on a Middle East exchange also.

Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, these items would have given rise to Third World screeching about Western cultural and economic imperialism. But today it is French and American whining that greets these moves.