Eight! Nine! Ten! These numbers may not have any immediate importance to the average person but to the boxer, these numbers are magical. For as we all know, to a superficial extent, the boxer trains and hones his skill for an eventual confrontation that allows for only one victor. Within this context, the numbers, Eight! Nine! and Ten! mark the pivotal moments before the boxer feels the joy of victory or the agony of defeat. We have recently watched a battle of a different kind in which the main event, featured November 7, 2006, was in the form of the mid-term political elections.  Different from the physical contest of the pugilists, this conflict centers over a choice of ideologies in which the hearts and minds of the nation are placed in the hands of a precious few individuals who are intended to vote the conscious of the country.

Lenin must be laughing from his Red Square coffin and Sam McLaughlin must be crying in his. Communism--successfully fought off by the west--has advanced Full Square into the United States of America - masquerading as big business.

Last week, NBC’s Tom Brokaw presented a one-hour television special on ILLegal immigration, “In the Shadow of the American Dream.” During the program, this great American soft-pedaled ILLegals’ impact on Vail, Aspen, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Colorado and the Roaring Fork Valley.

Are you familiar with the Channel Channel? Depending on the type of television service you have it varies, with the digital variety being the most state-of-the-art. It’s the channel that shows the schedule of television shows being offered on the other channels to which you subscribe (and to quite a few you probably don’t, or wouldn’t with a gun to your head).

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had better hurry up.  We’re down to the last few hours of 2006 and she hasn’t resigned yet.

Lyndon Johnson would tell anyone who would listen that he did not know how to get out of Vietnam. The result is a memorial wall in Washington, D.C. with the names of some 50,000 or more servicemen and women who died in a war this nation unequivocally lost. Four Presidents wrestled with the questions of whether to get into that civil war and then how to get out.

The Washington Post ombudsman, Deborah Howell, has written an article entitled, “Media ‘Liberalism’ Under the Microscope,” in which she suggests that journalists are not as liberal as we may think. I wrote her an email applauding her for addressing the problem but correcting her misunderstanding of the issue. It just so happens that I had completed my master’s thesis on liberal bias in the media. I am still hoping she takes a look at what I found.

I’m happy to announce our first authors to sign on. Be ready for stuff you need to know!

"The words in the Constitution are ‘cruel and unusual.’ Those are the words. It doesn’t talk about the death penalty. It’s embodying certain values.” So says Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, explaining why he thinks capital punishment might be unconstitutional.

The Internal Revenue Service generates a lot of anxious thought around this time each year. And it couldn’t happen to a creepier bunch of folks.

The domestic violence rate has declined since 1993, according to a report by the US Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Will Hillarycare Be Returning? - In 1993, Bill Clinton proposed a health care reform package plan to provide Universal Healthcare for all Americans. The proposed package was over 1,000 pages, yet buried in those pages were restrictions and aspects of the plan which were truly troubling. The plan aimed to cut the number of doctors (called ‘cost centers’) by one quarter in order to cut demand by limiting supply.  It also aimed to cut costs by cutting the number of specialists in half. 

For you religio-centric clods who haven’t yet expanded your celebratory horizons - and you know who you are - I bring a message of tolerance and inclusiveness: December 26 marked the start of Kwanzaa.

We finally have all of the salacious details of Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger’s criminal behavior in absconding with classified documents from the National Archives with the release of an Archives Inspector General report.  In 2003, Berger reviewed classified Clinton-era records pertaining to terrorism in preparation for testimony before the 9/11 Commission.  Berger lied about taking the classified documents from the Archives, and then later admitted to stealing the documents from the building and sliding them under a construction trailer.  He later retrieved the stolen classified documents from the construction area and returned with them to his office, where he destroyed several of the records with scissors. 

If you expected this article to be about Iraq, turn the page. We’ve already got a plethora of information on that post-Saddam madhouse. No, this piece is about the whole explosive Middle-East, about which most people, I venture to say, are dummies. And I are one.