THE 2008 CARPE DIEM FILTER
I personally believe that neither The PIAPS, Obambi Hussein, nor the Breck Boy have any reasonable chance of getting elected. And I cannot take seriously a Preacher Boy candidacy by another Arkansas populist con man. Yet when I think how America dodged a bullet from the likes of Algore and another from F'n Kerry, it's also hard to believe that Providence will push us aside from still another. Fortunately, Providence has always watched over America in spite of itself. For that to continue, the most minimal requirement for a president is to resist the liberal compulsion to apologize for America's existence in the world. We can upgrade the requirement to a determination to defend America's national security. The ideal requirement would be a president who knows how to carpe diem - who looks at problems as opportunities to pro-actively advance America's security and interests in the world. There will be plenty of such opportunities in 2008 and the following years of the next presidency. Let's judge our choice of candidates on who would best be able to not just defend in a crisis, but to recognize and maximize the opportunity in a crisis to America's benefit. One such crisis has just presented itself in Pakistan. Here are three more examples headed down the 2008 pike:
2007 IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR
2007. What a ride. What a finish. Just this week, a guy I once beat in arm-wrestling makes Time Magazine Man of the Year (I told the story way back in October of 2003 in Arm Wrestling With Russia - and I sure agree with Mitt Romney that the award was "disgusting."). It's just too delicious that up on Drudge right now (10am 12/21) is the British Guardian story about Putin's $40 Billion fortune. You learned about that last February in The World's Richest and Most Dangerous Gangster, which was updated a month ago in Pro-Communist Conservatives. A country I said back in April of 2005 was going to break apart (Bye Bye Bolivia) is now right on the brink of it. CNN is reporting Four Bolivian regions declare autonomy from government. Right on schedule this week, the fellow I said last April who would get elected president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, in Regime Change in Korea did so in a total landslide. I expect all of what I predicted in that article to come to pass next year: And on the domestic front, I hope you're all reveling in the marvelous John Edwards Love Child Scandal detailed in this week's National Enquirer. Particularly since you learned those details last October in The Breck Boy Is Cleared From The Presidential Field. Little Johnny is toast, just as predicted. Yet for all of the above, this week was just getting warmed up.
CHRISTMAS GIFTS FOR YOUR PC
[Mark Gilligan is TTP's own "Marco," known to all participants in the TTP User Forum. His first column appeared last month: Marco The Wizard? His column will be a regular feature in 2008.] It's the gifting time of the year and for your technological needs we have some suggestions that may make your life easier and your wallet less depleted. Here are a few... The anti-virus software package offered by AVG is one of the best available - and it's free! If you want the full capacity of Adobe's Acrobat Professional Apps and don't have the several hundred dollars in the budget, you can get its equivalent for only $9.95 at pdf995.com.
THE YEAR OF GLOBAL COOLING
Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards. Antarctica is getting colder. Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. Last January, $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a devastating five-day freeze. In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina's peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina's apple harvest. Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naïve.
BLUENOSES ON STEROIDS
I suppose it's possible that there are things I could care less about than Barry Bonds taking steroids. The latest antics of Britney Spears or the fate of contestants on one of those Survivor television shows, maybe. But the whole Bonds "scandal," the whole Mitchell Report bloviation about "rampant performance-enhancing drug use" in professional sports, baseball in particular, ranks near the top of my list of news items in the So What? category. Except there's something about it that really bugs me. Nanny-state ninnies sticking their bluenoses into none of their business. Fascist prosecutors trying to put people in jail for lying about something that's no crime. Increasingly louder demands for more intrusion into athletes' lives, for wrecking their careers, for their unending investigation, for their punishment. Someone needs to tell the bluenoses, from George Mitchell to George Will, from every insufferably puritanical sportswriter to every self-important airhead sportscaster to shut up. Or else the real fascists, the ones in Congress who have the capacity to shove government guns in our faces, will use the "scandal" - as they do with every other such opportunity - as an excuse to restrict the freedom of us all.
HELPING RAMOS AND COMPEAN HAVE A HAPPIER CHRISTMAS
For many conservatives, the most infuriating outrage of the Bush Presidency has been the prosecution and imprisonment of two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler in the ass. It is the drug smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, and the federal prosecutor, Johnny Sutton, who belong in jail, not them. For defending our border from mass foreign invasion, Ramos and Compean will be spending Christmas in solitary confinement, rather than with their families. It's hard to think of a more Christian, a more pro-American thing you could do this Christmas than send them a message of support and a donation to their wives and children. Here's how:
A FATAL LIBERAL HANDICAP
The most consistent theme running through liberal-left opinion since September 11, 2001, has been concern for the well-being of the enemy. The latest example is the contrived scandal over the CIA destroying tapes of interrogations of two captured terrorists. The first instinct of responsible members of Congress is to fulfill their duty to protect Americans from attack. Now they are pushed by ideological zealots to not only accord foreign adversaries "rights" that will protect them from effective U.S. counteraction but to harass their countrymen on the front lines in this deadly conflict. Indeed, for a liberal, the entire concept of an adversarial "us and them" is to be rejected. Adversaries are just people whom we have not taken the time to understand. Nothing could be more fundamentally wrong as a basis for dealing with the real world. An unwillingness to differentiate between friend and foe is a fatal handicap in making national policy.
GUN FREE ZONES: AN INVITATION FOR MASS MURDER
Matthew Murray, 24, entered the New Life church in Colorado Springs as services were getting out Dec. 9, and opened fire, killing Stephanie Works, 18, her sister, Rachael, 16, and wounding two others. There were shootings earlier this year at shopping malls in Omaha and Salt Lake City, where the body count was higher. Murray attacked a church because if you want to kill Christians, that's a good place to find them. Why the other would-be mass murderers choose shopping malls for their murder sprees? An obvious reason is because shopping malls are a target rich environment. If you want to kill a lot of people, go to where there are a lot of people to kill. The other reason is that these shopping malls proudly advertised themselves as "gun free zones."
THE IRONY OF INTEL INCOMPETENCE
"Blowback" is an intelligence term for adverse, unintended consequences of secret operations. The CIA first used it in a report on the 1953 operation that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Some in the intelligence community (IC) have been working with liberal journalists and Democrats on Capitol Hill to embarrass President Bush and to stymie his foreign policy initiatives. The most successful of these covert operations was the Valerie Plame affair, in which White House officials were falsely blamed for "outing" a CIA undercover officer who was not in fact undercover. (It was then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who inadvertently disclosed Ms. Plame's identity.) The most recent is the new National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and hasn't resumed it. Michael Ledeen, a former consultant to the National Security Council, described the NIE as "policy advocacy masquerading as serious intelligence." The apparent purpose of the NIE is to make it politically impossible for President Bush to take military action against Iran. But the effort has been so bald that it is blowing back on its authors.
REAGAN ON RUSHMORE
There is a growing movement among conservatives to have the image of Ronald Reagan carved into Mount Rushmore, joining George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. To facilitate this noble goal, former Congressman (and accomplished photographer) Fred Eckert and artist Ted Williams have created photo-art that realistically depicts what Reagan on Rushmore would actually look like: 
They are offering gallery-quality prints that are display ready - no frame necessary, just put it up on the wall. The photo-art is good enough to fool a gullible liberal. "Haven't you heard? Reagan's on Rushmore now - there's the proof!"