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THE SUNNY SPRING SAN DIEGO RENDEZVOUS


Do political and geopolitical events seem to you to be moving at warp speed?  Do you feel you need a fix of sanity or else you might lose your mind with all the craziness swamping our country?

Then you totally and truly need to come to the To The Point Spring Rendezvous in sunny San Diego this May 14-16.

We're staying at the Westin San Diego, minutes from the airport, minutes from Sea World, Coronado Island, the Gaslamp District, Mission Bay, and so much more - with every room overlooking San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean, and in perfect springtime California weather.

So mark it down - Friday May 14 to Sunday May16 - gas up the family buggy if you live in CA, or book your flights right now.  Your sanity requires that you bask in the Oasis for Rational Conservatives for this May weekend.

We're going to start the Rendezvous right on Friday night with a special guest, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.  You've seen Dana numerous times on Fox and other news channels, and he'll be giving you the inside scoop on just how evil the Pelosicrats are, and how the Republicans in Congress are going to reverse that evil.

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THE DEATH SPIRAL OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN


There's always a certain fascination watching tyrannies coming unstuck, and the convulsions of the Iranian regime are more colorful than most.,

You'd expect this from such a rich and ancient culture, and from such clever and imaginative people who specialize in illusion.  Last week (7/24) all these qualities were on display in Tehran, at a central mosque where Hashemi Rafsanjani was preaching to the faithful. 

There were masses of people in and around the mosque, and at a certain point in a scene that would have delighted Fellini, the two sides faced off in a chanting contest.  The pro-regime crowd shouted "Death to America!"  The much larger pro-democracy crowd responded, "Death to Russia!" 

Then came from the pro-regimers: "Death to Britain, Death to Israel!"  And the reply:  "Death to China!"

Which pretty much sums up the contemporary strategic landscape, enacted in a Persian morality play in front of a mosque in Tehran.  Plus this: The stench of panic is now widespread in Iran. 

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UPDATES FOR A HAPPY FOURTH


637 million IE Browsers at risk

Researchers claim there are 637 million Internet Explorer users at risk, because they are less likely to update their browser for security updates, than Firefox, Safari and Opera users. If this is you, please protect yourself and update now.

Independence Day

Happy July 4th to all Americans, we have so much to be proud of!

People know your Bill of Rights

You live in the land of the free, please know your rights!

Syllabus of SCOTUS in District of Columbia ET AL. V. HELLER

No. 07-290.  Argued March 18, 2008-Decides June 26, 2008.

America The Beautiful

Katharine Lee Bates first wrote this song in 1913. We've all sung the first stanza many times - but there are seven more.  For all the stanzas and a history about her, click on the link above.

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DEM DISASTER IN DENVER


All the smart talk seems to be about a "brokered" Republican convention, with the GOP in a confused mess all through the summer until somebody is finally chosen in Minneapolis in early September.

Yet the odds for that are decreasing, and may drastically do so if Romney takes Florida away from McCain next Tuesday.  Huckabee will be history, Giuliani wounded perhaps mortally, all the big conservative guns like Limbaugh will put McCain in the crosshairs, and Mitt Is It for the GOP.

The big difference between the GOP and Dem primaries, particularly those of Super Tuesday (2/5) is that most of the former's are winner-take-all, while the latter's are proportional.

Thus Hillary could "win" all the primaries from now to June and still not get a majority of delegates.  In fact, with the vicious catfight going on between her and Obama Hussein, that's the likely outcome.  It's the Dems who face a brokered convention, and it is going to be a disaster.

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GOOGLE’S SECRETS – AND YOURS


Warren Buffett can feel confident about sinking his $4 billion into Israel - at least from an electronic-security point of view.

I can say with utmost certainty that the country's most sensitive secrets are safely stowed away on secure servers, inaccessible to the public.

Try as I might, I couldn't find any Word documents marked "top secret" regarding Israel's plans regarding Iran on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site; no PowerPoint presentations on Israel's alleged nuclear weapons program on the Ministry of Defense site; no PDFs on future political plans on the main government site - nothing, nada, not a thing! 

Even using the special advanced "Google hacking" techniques I learned from Johnny, I couldn't get an untoward, scandalous or headline-making fact on any of the burning issues of the day.

One less thing for Warren Buffett to worry about.

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Chapter Ten: VERA CRUZ

Malinali and Bernal returned to the camp to find all the Spaniards assembled in front of Cortez’s tent, talking loudly and arguing amongst themselves. In response to Malinali’s questioning glance, Bernal smiled. “Ah, the Captain’s trap is being sprung.”

Taking her aside, he explained. “Remember that I told you my cousin, Don Diego Velasquez, was governor of Cuba? The truth is that he is a greedy fat man who has many friends and many enemies - and our soldiers here are made up of both. Those who are friends of Velasquez want to return to their haciendas in Cuba. They think that Velasquez will share most of the gold Montezuma has given us with them. The enemies of Velasquez want to stay and found a colony with lands and haciendas of their own. They will get nothing from Velasquez if they return to Cuba.”

“And which side is Captain Cortez on?” Malinali wanted to know.

Bernal laughed long and hard. “Ah, Doña Marina, the stories of Cortez and Don Diego are already legendary in Cuba! I must tell them to you someday, then you will laugh as well. No, Cortez made such a fool of Don Diego that he has no thought of returning to Cuba. That is why a few days ago he asked for my help, which I was happy to give.

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SOVIET CELL PHONES AND SUITCASE NUKES

It’s a common debating trick to focus on one perceived error in your opponent’s argument, ignore all the other points, and pretend that if you can refute that one point every other point and therefore the entire argument is refuted.

Thus I have gotten a lot of flack over my noting, in The Hiroshimic Imposture , that so-called Soviet suitcase nukes built in 1988 could not be set off with a cell phone as claimed because there were no cell phones back then.

As Joe Farah kidded me in a Front Page interview, “The cell phone is 30 years old. I had a cell phone in 1988. Jack’s memory is a little faulty here.”

I’m sure Joe is right - about his having a cell phone the size of a brick back then. The only guy I saw with one in those days was Ollie North. So yes, there were American cell phones. But Soviet cell phones? Nope, no such thing. The first cellular systems were introduced into Russia in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, using the analog NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephony) protocol.

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THE GREAT GLOBAL TAX HAVEN LIE


Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands. Cayman is prosperous, in part, because of a great global lie, which causes many big rich nations to pursue bad economic policies. The global lie is that the developed countries have too little government, rather than too much.

The simple and obvious empirical fact that most developing and developed countries with smaller government sectors have grown faster in recent decades than those countries with big government sectors is ignored both by the politicians and many in the media.

The political classes in these big government countries, rather than taking responsibility for their own misguided policies, look for scapegoats. Their favorite scapegoats are high-growth countries with low tax rates on savings and investment. They blame offshore financial centers like Cayman, Hong Kong, Bermuda, and even mid-sized countries like Switzerland for engaging in "unfair tax competition."

The truth behind the great global "tax haven" lie is that offshore financial centers owe their prosperity to tax transparency, not tax evasion.

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OBAMA IS NOT A MONARCH


The Constitution designs a system of checks and balances for our nation, and executive amnesty for immigrants here illegally unilaterally decreed from the White House would seriously undermine the rule of law.

Our founders repeatedly warned about the dangers of unlimited power within the executive branch; Congress should heed those words as the president threatens to grant amnesty to millions of people who have come to our country illegally.

To be clear, the dispute over executive amnesty is not between President Obama and Republicans in Congress; it is a dispute between President Obama and the American people. The Democrats suffered historic losses in the midterm elections largely over the prospect of the president's executive amnesty. 

President Obama was correct: His policies were on the ballot across the nation in 2014. The elections were a referendum on amnesty, and the voters soundly rejected it. There was no ambiguity.

Undeterred, President Obama appears to be going forward. It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people. If he acts by executive diktat, President Obama will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch.

Congress, representing the voice of the people, should use every tool available to prevent the president from subverting the rule of law.  Here are two of them.

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A TREMBLE OF EUROWEENIES


Some of my favorite words in the English language are "collective nouns," the colorful names for groups of animals going back to the 15th century that every kid had to know to go hunting with his dad. Not knowing them was laughable ignorance.

We would laugh today if someone said a "herd of fish" instead of a school, or a "flock of cattle," instead of a herd or drove. We know it's a pride of lions, but it's a leap of leopards, a crash of rhinos, a shrewdness of apes, a skulk of foxes. Perhaps you've heard of a murder of crows or an exultation of larks, but it's an unkindness of ravens, an ostentation of peacocks, a bouquet of pheasants, a parliament of owls.

Collective nouns were applied to groups of people as well. We still call it a congregation of churchgoers, but it's an impatience of wives, a boast of soldiers, an impertinence of peddlers, an illusion of painters. I love the one for prostitutes: a flourish of strumpets.

It's a tremble of cowards.  That certainly was the appropriate designation for the French-German Euroweenie portion of participants at the Paris conference I attended earlier this week.

It was a conference on Global Security organized by the French Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, and NATO. It had a dual focus:  on the threat of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and on cybersecurity. 

Held in the King's Council Chamber of Les Invalides, among the 40 some attendees were ministers of defense and ambassadors from several countries, high level EU and NATO officials, Pentagon generals, and key executives from major defense and cybersecurity companies.  I attended as the geopolitical strategist for one of the conference sponsors.

There was no press, and no attribution for anything said was permitted.  Given that restriction, here is what happened.

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THE NSA’S ACHILLES HEEL?


I have to keep this short as I'm soon boarding a very long flight to China.  Jack Kelly will be manning the HFR ramparts while I'm gone, but I have to tell you this now.

The story starts with an obscure state politician representing District 67 of the Utah House of Representatives named Marc Roberts.  If you look at that official state government website, you won't see anything unusual.

Like most pols, he also has his own site: marcroberts67.com.  How many elected politicians start their site off with a quote from Bastiat's The Law?  Followed by a statement of commitment to State Sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment?

Yet it's not Roberts' words that are most interesting, however, it's what he is doing.  He may have found the Achilles' Heel of the NSA.

You may have heard of the gigantic $1.5 billion, one million square-foot date collection center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah called Bumblehive.  It will require 1.7 million gallons of water a day to cool the massive NSA computers spying on all of us.  Roberts knows how to cut off the water supply.

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MAKE SURE IT MATTERS


I've written about how willpower takes energy, and when our reserves get depleted - through fatigue, hunger, or overuse - our willpower can weaken. But what if you have to take care of things anyway?

What if you're tired, you're hungry, you've been overworking all day, and you still need to take care of something that's very important?

I think we've all been in that situation, and we've all found that somehow we take care of things. How can this be? What makes the difference?

It has to matter enough to us.  Here's how to tell the difference.

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MICHELLE OBAMA’S MESSAGE FOR US


"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

This statement by Michelle Obama on Feb. 18, 2008, at an appearance at UCLA, initially struck me as supremely arrogant and frightening... because it is supremely arrogant and frightening; and it is an honest expression -except for the putting-down-divisions part - of what Obama has tried to do as President.

It is an expression of progressive presumptuousness: trying to make people better; thinking the right leaders can mold us into the kind of people that the progressives think that we should be.

But let's look at it from a different angle; perhaps we should be thanking Michelle Obama for her challenge that we start living up to and acting upon the principles of America's founding.

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THE FREEDOM FROM RATIONED HEALTH CARE ACT


A Special Announcement from To The Point

With the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts this week, the Democrats have abandoned their maniacal attempt to pass ObamaCare "health reform" legislation.

Yet it is little known that a significant part of the ObamaCare program has secretly already been voted into law as part of the stimulus bill Congress passed in February, 2009.  This is $20 billion for "death panel" health rationing boards.

The mortal threat that ObamaCare poses to the health and freedom of all Americans cannot be eliminated until the sections of the stimulus bill authorizing funding for the health rationing boards is repealed.

Today (1/22), Congressman Thad McCotter (R-MI) introduced legislation to do just that:  The Freedom from Rationed Health Care Act.  The Bill number is HR 4500.

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THE PERSIAN CIRCUS


Seven days to go to the Iranian "elections" on June 12.  Of course Iran doesn't have elections, as we understand the term.  It has circuses. 

Most people don't bother to vote, since they think - with good reason - that the outcome simply reflects the wishes of the only voter whose opinion matters:  Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 

But even so, the "campaign" is quite lively, and some very unusual things are happening.  Can we read the entrails of the latest dead chicken?  Let's give it a try.

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