Appeasement doesn't work. It doesn't work with dictators, and it doesn't work with terrorists. The attempted Times Square bombing on May 1^st was yet more proof.

We've allowed Islamist extremists to dictate what we can say, print or portray. We don't want to offend them. The First Amendment bows before Islam.

The Obama administration has ducked all unwelcome evidence that such appeasement doesn't work. Instead, it goes to absurd lengths to convince Moslem radicals that we respect their views.  Since the Obama administration deepened our submissive attitude toward Islam -- banning all references to "Islamist terror" or "Moslem radicalism" from government documents and statements -- the number of terror attacks on our soil has gone up. Do any of you believe this is just a coincidence?

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?

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.

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:

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 62^nd 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.

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.

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.

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.