The To The Point Phoenix Rendezvous is little more than two months away: January 23-25.  It will be a conspiracy - TTPers plotting how best to survive the depredations of the coming NMP Regime. As we said in the immediate wake of last week's electoral insanity, TTP will be focusing on practical survival, on preserving and even expanding your freedom and pocketbook. Yet - a big yet - there are a number of things that we can't put in print, but can only discuss in a completely closed-session off-the-books personal discussion - and that's what we'll be doing in Phoenix.  We'll be sending you the details regarding the venues and costs shortly.  But to get in an early reservation and deposit, as we can accommodate a limited number, please email Miko, TTP's general manager, at [email protected]  now. Speaking of now, however, let's get to work on some initial steps you can take to protect yourself personally and financially.  Here are two ways to consider regarding what to do with your money, one relative, one absolute.

Ordinarily, the identity of the party chairman doesn't matter very much.  The proof of this is that the current chairman of the Republican National Committee is Mike Duncan.  I hadn't heard of him, either. The party chairman is usually mostly a fund-raiser and a technician.  But this is one of those rare times in history when the chairman of the Republican National Committee will have to function as the chief spokesman for the party, its primary public face. The RNC will select a new chairman soon. The new leader needs to be a man of ideas and vision who can communicate them well, and a superb fund-raiser who is comfortable with the new technologies.  But Ronald Reagan is unavailable, and Superman and Batman exist only in comic books. But there is a man whose time has come, or, rather, returned.

The week before the election, the Obama campaign ran a television commercial attacking the Republican candidate for vice president. To my knowledge, this has never been done before. Within days of Sarah Palin's selection by John McCain to be his running mate, there was speculation in the news media that maternal neglect was the cause of baby Trig's Down Syndrome; that Trig was really daughter Bristol's baby; that Sarah was a fundamentalist who believes dinosaurs and men coexisted; that she once belonged to a secessionist party; that as mayor of Wasilla, she tried to have popular books banned from the town library. None of this was true, but this was how the news media introduced Gov. Palin to people in the lower 48.  No vice presidential candidate has ever been subjected to such a torrent of abuse.

Her name was Jacqueline. I thought of her as I stood on the beach looking out at the waves. It was a lonely stretch of beach in north Malibu, near the Ventura County Line. Far away from the frenetic bustle of L.A., I had moved up here where it was peaceful and quiet, where I could walk on the beach in solitude and recover from her loss. She was born in the French Alps, the daughter of a cheesemaker. Growing up in the rustic village of Villette‑par‑Aime in the province of Savoie south of Mont Blanc, she had had a Heidi‑like childhood ‑‑ herding sheep, milking cows, gathering wild raspberries and mushrooms in the forest. She grew up to be a tough strong mountain girl, helping her family eke out the montagnard (French mountain peasant) way of life amongst the glaciers and waterfalls, the high alpine pastures strewn with wildflowers, the valleys and crags of the Alps. Finishing the local school, she made her way to Paris as a magician's apprentice in a traveling magic show that toured through the small villages and towns of France, from Provence to Gascony, from Brittany to Champagne. Once in Paris, she struggled at part‑time office jobs while taking singing and dancing lessons at night. The lessons paid off when she was hired by the legendary Folies Bergère. With her spectacular beauty, she quickly became the world famous show's principal showgirl, idolized by all of Paris and surrounded by a horde of admirers ‑‑ writers, directors, millionaires, and playboys. "Every night," she had told me, "there would be so many roses in my dressing room I hardly had any space to change costumes. And just two years before, I was digging potatoes with my mother and herding cows with my father!" Her life had become a dream. But her greatest dream lay beyond Paris ‑‑ it was to come to America.

Does the value of your stock market holdings depend on which party controls Congress? There is overwhelming evidence it does. As can be seen in the accompanying chart, over the last quarter of a century when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the stock market rose by an average of about 20 percent per year. When the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the stock market only rose at an average annual rate of 6.9 percent for the Dow Jones and a tepid 5.1 percent for the Standard and Poor 500.

"After all this time with him, I still can't say with certainty who he is," wrote Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times Tuesday about Barack Hussein Obama, with whom he's spent roughly 18 hours a day for most of this campaign. Sen. Obama rarely engages in banter with the reporters who travel with him, and typically is in "robo-candidate mode" on the rare occasions he does speak with them, Mr. Nicholas said. "Ironically, those of us who were sent out to take his measure in person can't offer much help in answering who he is, or if he is ready.  The barriers set in place between us and him were just too great." Less is known about Barack Hussein Obama than about any major party candidate for president in modern history.  His public resume is thin -- eight years in the Illinois state senate, four in the U.S. Senate, with two of them being spent running for president. And no candidate for president has had more problematic associations.  Here's a quick list of them that the media refuses to investigate.