As an intelligence officer or journalist, you've got to know which sources you can trust. And a source who's never let me down told me this week (3/30) that the terrorist multinational based in Pakistan is coming apart.

According to this insider's insider, the Pakistan-headquartered Afghan Taliban is furious at the Taliban's Pakistani wing because its assaults on the Islamabad government triggered a stunning backlash.

Unleashed at last, Pakistan's military launched a series of offensives aimed at smacking down the domestic Taliban.  Good news at last.  If only there were the same in Afghanistan, where our president made a furtive six-hours-in-the-night visit Sunday (3/28).   The Taliban laughed at Obama, saying he was afraid to come during the daytime and calling him a thief in the night.

If Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States, do you know what will happen to federal tax rates and government spending?

If you answered "yes," then you have not been paying attention, because Mr. Obama and his advisers keep changing what they say they are going to do.

Even more importantly, under the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the sole power to tax and appropriate funds, not the president. Congress always rewrites presidential tax and spending proposals, even when the president and congressional majority are of the same party, and hence no president gets to dictate fiscal policy.

The questions we should be asking are: What changes is Congress likely to make in the tax law, the level of spending, and energy policy if Mr. Obama is elected, and likewise if Sen. John McCain is elected?  This table shows what happened to the economy during the past quarter of a century when each party controlled (or shared control of) Congress:

It's glorious to be in Paris on May Day with a beautiful woman - especially if she's your wife.  We're here this week to see our youngest son who's spending his junior year in high school studying in France.

On May Day, the streets of Paris are filled with sellers of muguets, the sweet-smelling flowers of Lillies of the Valley.  Every man buys a muguet for his sweetheart.  I am no different.

Unfortunately, communists and lefties of every stripe use May Day - a happy day of celebration of springtime since ancient times - to vent their envious hatred of capitalist prosperity.  Demonstrations and protests took place today in hundreds of French cities - and Paris was no exception.

Seeing these angry "workers" and "students" marching along in rage and resentment demanding the world provide them with a living while ignorantly denouncing the only economic system that can provide it is an amusing "Walpole moment."

As in Horace Walpole, who observed, "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." (See What We Have Got and They Have Not.)

There are hundreds of years of oil supplies (at present and projected consumption levels) if oil in oil sands and shale is properly included in reserves.   And it can be produced at a cost of $35-$50 a barrel.

Does it seem a bit odd that the current price of oil is between two and three times the cost of producing all the oil the world presently needs and will need long into the future? The reason the price is so high is that the supply has been artificially constrained by governments.

Take our Congress.  Some politicians there argue that even if the U.S. government started to allow increased production, that it would be seven to 10 years or more before there would be additional output. This is nonsense.

Yet the very same politicians who claim we cannot increase oil production quickly are often the same ones who tell us we need to move to alternative forms - windmills and solar, etc. - without seeming to understand these desirable technologies will take far more time to meet the goals of "energy independence" than ramping up oil production.

A few years back, I wrote that Russia's Vladimir Putin was the most impressive major leader on today's world stage. Since then, he's gotten better.

Back then, he was eating President George W. Bush for breakfast. Now he's snacking on President Obama as sushi -- eating him raw, in happy little bites.  Mr. Obama is so naïvely pliable in the Russian leader's hands Putin should nickname him President Putty.

Putin is ruthless, unforgiving, and murderous. He is the Evil Empire's belated answer to President Ronald Reagan. Where the Gipper focused uncompromisingly on bringing down the Soviet imperium, Putin focuses uncompromisingly on restoring imperial Russia.

Putin doesn't seem like a man much given to hilarity, but he must be laughing his butt off at our incompetence. Consider his strategic achievements in just the last few months:

The mass murder of innocent civilians in the Moscow Metro suicide bombings on Monday (3/29) has again brought into focus the evil of radical Islamism and the imperative of civilized people everywhere to stop it.

As clear-cut a case of Islamist barbarism as it is, however, it is difficult to make sense of the spiraling violence in Russia without reference to Vladimir Putin's disastrous anti-terrorism policies.

A Moslem terrorist group from Chechnia - a province in a region of southern Russia called the North Caucasus - has claimed responsibility for the attack.  It is the latest incident in a long struggle between the Chechens and their Russian overlords.

Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, President Putin from the very beginning of his tenure in the Kremlin ten years ago showed himself completely unwilling to consider any negotiated settlement with the Chechens.  He pursued a strictly military solution, and set up a puppet regime in the Chechen capital of Grozny instead.

Putin's attitude is characterized by his vulgar promise to the resistance to "rub them out in the latrine."  He made that promise in 1999.  This week he slightly rephrased it, promising the resistance will be "scrapped from the sewers."  Thus we could call his anti-terrorism policy Putin's Sewer Strategy.  Unfortunately for him, it is his strategy that is in the toilet, not the terrorists.

Which of the following families is "richer"?

The first family consists of a wife who has recently become a medical doctor, and she makes $160,000 per year. Her husband is a small business entrepreneur who makes $110,000 per year, giving them a total family income of $270,000 per year.

However, they are still paying off the loans the wife took out for medical school and the loans the husband took out to start his business, amounting to debts of $300,000. Their total assets are valued at $450,000; hence, their real net worth or wealth (the difference between gross assets and liabilities) is only $150,000.

The second family consists of a trial lawyer who took early retirement and his non-working wife. They have an annual income of $230,000, all of it derived from interest on tax-free municipal bonds they own. However, their net worth is $7 million, consisting of $5 million in bonds, a million-dollar home with no mortgage, and a million dollars in art work, home furnishings, automobiles and personal items.

The second family is clearly far better off financially than the first family, yet many in the U.S. Congress, including Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, want to increase taxes on the first (and poorer) family and not on the wealthier family.

Here's the question of the week:  Why do Democrat presidents insist on having evil idiot lesbians in their Cabinet?

It would be very hard for an American to be more evil than Bill Clinton's alcoholic lesbian Attorney General Janet Reno - as revealed years ago in America's Saddam.

Now it seems that another lesbian named Janet -- Zero's DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano - wants to try.  Lucky for us, she's even more of a moron than Ms. Reno.

After labeling anyone with conservative small government/prolife views a "right-wing extremist" and Iraq war veterans as potential terrorists - then completing an imbecile hat trick by blaming Canada for 9/11 - it's small wonder that demands for her resignation are growing.

She has quickly become a complete laughingstock in Canada.  The National Post, one of the country's major papers, wants to know how she got her job, because she is "as knowledgeable about border issues as a late-night radio call-in yahoo."

But she's also not the only Dem laughingstock this week - here are three more.

It's wretched enough that our "friend" Ahmed Chalabi has become Iran's point man in Iraq. Now "our man in Kabul," President Hamid Karzai, is quietly shifting his loyalty to Tehran.

Beyond Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad's recent chummy visit to Karzai -- reported by the media but downplayed by Washington -- Iran's been training Taliban forces to kill our troops more efficiently.

Karzai hasn't complained. Nor has he objected to Tehran's expansion of its support for its clients in western Afghanistan. He wants that support for himself.

Far from being a gleaming apostle of democracy, Karzai's just another hustler from the lands that perfected the con. Like Chalabi, he knew the magic words to say to Americans, then did whatever he wanted for himself, his fantastically corrupt family and his cronies.

Karzai's people despise him; his allies distrust him; his enemies mock him. And our troops keep him in power. Does that sound like a formula for success? One that we should ask our soldiers to risk their lives for?