What do we want the future Egypt to look like? A flawed, hybrid democracy, or a Sunni Muslim version of Iran? Based on his bluster yesterday (8/14) about events on the Nile, Secretary of State John Kerry prefers the latter.

And Kerry's remarks must have had White House approval.

In full outrage mode, America's most famous windsurfer castigated the Egyptian authorities, insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood had a right to "peaceful protests." Apparently, "peaceful" means armed with Kalashnikovs, killing policemen, kidnapping and torturing opponents, turning mosques into prisons, attacking Christians and burning Coptic churches.

The Brotherhood protesters rejected all offers of compromise and all demands to disperse. The interim government's response was heavy-handed, but the Muslim Brothers chose violent resistance - using women and children as shields (a tactic typical of Islamist terrorists).

Do we really need to have sympathy for the devil?

Prague, Czech Republic. Year by year, the current nine countries of Eastern and Central Europe that were controlled by the Soviets -- Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia -- become relatively more prosperous in comparison to the richer nations of Western Europe. As a result of the European debt crisis, this trend is likely to accelerate.

It has been more than two decades since these countries acquired their freedom. All have become multiparty, largely free-market democracies. What seems normal now was far from a foregone conclusion at the time of the dissolution of the old Soviet Union. In fact, most bets would have wagered that not all these nations would have made it.

Today, all nine are doing better, often far better, than the rest of the EU.  Here's why.

Alaska’s Frank Murkowski has my nomination for the most courageous governor in the US. Sick and tired of spineless Washington Republicans unable to overcome the religious worship of the Alaska tundra by Democrats and Eco-Fascists, Murkowski has announced oil and gas lease sales for offshore drilling in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of ANWR (the sacred and holy Alaska National Wildlife Refuge).

It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in Monterey, California, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbor before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice.

I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world's great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent Vitamin A Deficiency or VAD, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets.

Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers' fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning.

Here's the awful story, and why the leaders of Greenpeace should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity like war criminals.

Did you know that President Obama is responsible for the loss of more U.S. jobs than any other person?

Did you know that Sen. John F. Kerry and his wife are three to four times as rich as Mitt and Ann Romney, according to the New York Times, yet paid a lower tax rate than the Romneys in 2003, the year before Mr. Kerry ran for president?

Do you know how to lower your tax rate? Do you know how abysmally ignorant and hyprocritical Democrats are on tax regulations?  Read on.

John Kerry’s 1971 screed against America, The New Soldier, written when he was the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testifying in Congress that his “band of brothers” (as he calls them now) were war criminals, is available in its entirety online at http://johnkerrythenewsoldier.blogspot.com/.

You can download and read the whole book for free. Also free are three chapters of John O’Niells bestseller, Unfit for Command. If you know anyone wavering on Kerry, send them the link.

New evidence coming to light in the British National Archives and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University may soon change our entire view of the Anglo-American slave trade, and the roots of institutional plantation slavery in the Americas.

With luck it will help to vindicate the fathers of "classical liberal" government and the free market in the 17th and 18th centuries, falsely accused until now of abetting - or promoting - the great crime of race-based African slavery.

For academic orthodoxy holds that John Locke (1632-1704) and the great Whig thinkers of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped to design and foster the economic system of hereditary slavery that shaped Atlantic capitalism for a century and a half.

From that it is but a step to dismiss the moral claims of classical liberalism as so much humbug, to write off all the talk of justice, natural rights, inviolable contracts and government by consent as the self-interested catechism of oppressors. As Samuel Johnson said acidly: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Except that this established version of events is not true. It is a near complete inversion of what happened, and this matters in all kinds of ways since the debate over slavery refuses to subside.