The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another term.

Will someone please explain why this bloodless transfer of power to the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers or Barack Obama? For all have denounced the "coup" and demanded Zelaya's immediate...]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science," wrote Thomas Huxley. "Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be."

As "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain.

He is quoted above for two reasons.

First is House passage of a "cap-and-trade" climate-change bill. Depending on which scientists you believe, the dire consequences of global warming are inconvenient truths -- or a fearmongering scheme to siphon off the wealth of individuals and empower bureaucrats.

The...]]> Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall.

And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading.

In May, when five fund-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Gov. Schwarzenegger pleaded with the overtaxed Californians not to make their state "the poster child for dysfunction."

As The Economist writes, "On May 18th, they did exactly that."

Arnold went to the White House for U.S. loan guarantees for new state bonds. But with the president's approval rating wilting because of a belief he is spending too much, the...]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Given its monopoly of guns, bet on the Iranian regime. But, in the long run, the ayatollahs have to see the handwriting on the wall.

Let us assume what they insist upon -- that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election; that, even if fraud occurred, it did not decide the outcome. As Ayatollah Khamenei said to loud laughter in his Friday sermon declaring the election valid, "Perhaps 100,000, or 500,000, but how can anyone tamper with 11 million votes?"

Still, the ayatollah and Ahmadinejad must hear the roar of the rapids ahead. Millions of Iranians, perhaps a majority of the professional class and educated young, who shouted, "Death to the Dictatorship," oppose or detest...]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 On Dec. 14, 1825, following the death of Alexander I -- who had seen off Napoleon -- his brother, the grand duke, who had just taken the oath as Czar Nicholas I, was confronted by mutinous troops and rebels in Senate Square before the Winter Palace.

For hours, the czar stood at the end of the square as the crowd shouted for a constitution or for Nicholas' brother Constantine to take the throne. Shots were exchanged.

As darkness fell, a czarist general rode up to Nicholas and said, "Sire, clean the square with gunfire -- or abdicate."

The cannons belched -- and Nicholas reigned for 30 years.

Most autocratic regimes face such moments.

After Joseph...]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Obama policy of extending an open hand to Iran is working and ought not be abandoned because of the grim events in Tehran.

For the Iranian theocracy has just administered a body blow to its legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people and the world.

Before Saturday, the regime could credibly posture as defender of the nation, defiant in the face of the threats from Israel, faithful to the cause of the Palestinians, standing firm for Iran's right to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear power.

Today, the regime, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is under a cloud of suspicion that they are but another gang of corrupt politicians who brazenly stole...]]> Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Having lost the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, Republicans are looking to redefine themselves for a nation that still leans conservative but is less Republican that it has been in decades.

The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court presents just such an opportunity. For, even if the party loses the battle and Sotomayor sits on the court, it can win the war, as Ronald Reagan won the Panama Canal debate, even as Senate Republicans committed collective suicide by voting to give away the canal.

What are the grounds for rejecting Sonia Sotomayor?

No one has brought forth the slightest evidence she has the intellectual candlepower to...]]> Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Despite his boldness, Barack Obama seems as fated to fail as were Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. And for the same reason: a belief in his own righteousness and moral superiority, and a belief that his ideals and his persona count mightily in the modern world.

Wilson declaimed about America's fight to "make the world safe for democracy" when in harness with the British, French, Russian, Japanese and Italian empires, all slavering to feast on the carcasses of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman empires.

By 1920, Wilson was a tragic failure, mocked by ex-allies and reviled by former enemies for having dishonored his own 14 Points.

Jimmy Carter declared in 1977 that...]]> Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews lives in Jerusalem."

Thus did Israeli government press director Daniel Seamen caustically dismiss President Obama's opposition to Israel's right to "natural growth" of its settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and on the West Bank.

Though Obama's address in Cairo broke no new ground, it confirmed to the world that a new day has arrived and a sea change has taken place. The Israel-centric Middle East policy of George W. Bush is dead. And with the policy change has come rhetorical change.

With Bush, it was "axis of evil," "you are with us or you are with the...]]> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If the U.S. Senate rejects race-based justice, Sonia Sotomayor will never sit on the Supreme Court.

Because that is what Sonia is all about. As The New York Times reported Saturday, the salient cause of her career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin.

"Judge Sotomayor, whose parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico," writes reporter David Kirkpatrick, "has championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career."

At Princeton, she headed up Accion Puertorriquena, which filed a complaint with the Department of Health, Education and...]]> Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court -- in Barack Obama's America.

Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks "Latina women," because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America is all about, that appellate courts are "where policy is made" in the United States.

To those who believe the depiction of our first Hispanic justice as an anti-white liberal judicial activist, hearken to her own words.

Speaking at Berkeley in 2001, Sonia told her audience, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman...]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Dick Cheney is giving the Republican Party a demonstration of how to fight a popular president. Stake out defensible high ground, do not surrender an inch, then go onto the attack.

The ground on which Cheney has chosen to stand is the most defensible the Republicans have: homeland security. In seven-and-a-half years after 9-11, not one terrorist attack struck our country.

And, unlike Obama's position, Cheney's is 100 percent reality based. He was there. He lived through this. He made the decisions to use the harsher techniques on the worst of the enemy who could yield the greatest intelligence to save American lives.

"The interrogations were used on hardened...]]> Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 On Sept. 20, 2002, as the War Party was beating the drum for preventive war on Iraq, lest we wake up to "a mushroom cloud over an American city," The Wall Street Journal introduced an eminent voice to confirm that, yes, Saddam was driving straight for an atomic bomb.

"This is a dictator who is ... feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons," wrote Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel.

"Saddam's nuclear program has changed. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country -- and Iraq is a very big country. Even...]]> Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If there are no peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians for an independent Palestinian state, war next year is inevitable.

So King Abdullah II of Jordan has told the London Times: "If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12 to 18 months."

Whether the king's timetable is correct, endless cold war, erupting into hot wars, seems the fate of Israel if "Bibi" Netanyahu holds to his pledge never to allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

For, as John Mearsheimer, author of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," writes in the May 18 American Conservative, if there is no...]]> Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 By reversing himself and refusing to release graphic photos of abused prisoners of war, Barack Obama has stunned liberals.

They feel betrayed and abandoned by a president they put into office. On war and torture, at least, they thought Barack was one of them. He is not. Barack is not into ideology. He is into Barack.

As he showed in 2008, when he threw his white grandmother under the bus and spared his beloved black pastor, the Rev. Wright, then threw Wright under the bus when his toxicity level rose too high, Barack has all the sentimentality of Michael Corleone when it comes to the family business.

And what Obama is saying with his refusal to release the photos is...]]>